A teacher's problem often lies not in figuring out how to do the job efficiently, but in figuring out what the job actually involves in the first place. If you think it just involves “teaching”, you're probably on the wrong website. A huge amount of the job is done outside the classroom. Of course, most teachers do think about what they do outside the classroom, and they break it down into different categories, and consider how to do each thing best. The problem is that they use the wrong categories. Foolishly and naively, they usually use the categories which are provided for them by the Department of Education and the teachers' unions: 'marking', 'meetings', 'admin' and so on.
To understand why this isn't useful in terms of time management, let's look at a few examples:
Teacher A: “My big problem is marking. OK, each piece of KS3 homework only takes two minutes to mark, but I teach two full-size classes in Year 7, and the same in Years 8 and 9. That's 180 students, so 'just two minutes' adds up to six hours a week.”
Teacher B: “My big problem is marking. Upper-school exam scripts are the worst. The grade boundaries are so woolly, and each piece of evidence has to be annotated. The guidance notes are long and waffly with pernickety definitions. Each piece of coursework takes an hour to mark, which means six hours a week.
Teacher C: “Meetings waste a lot of my time. Last budget meeting started with the Deputy Head questioning whether I should even be there. Then I had to go through my proposals line-by-line, giving justification of every expense, while getting heckles and objections from the other Faculty Heads. The meeting was only 30 minutes but it took me three hours to prepare.”
Teacher D: “Meetings waste a lot of my time. The last briefing meeting started with a 20-minute waffly speech by the Deputy Head, followed by a series of pointless half-hour policy presentations from each Faculty Head, then rambling Q&A. Three hours in all.”
Hopefully, the issue here is obvious: teachers A & B have have named the same category of work as their problem area (marking) – even though the type of work they are doing is entirely different. Teacher B is engaged in textual analysis and applying domain-specific skills, while Teacher A is engaged in basic bureaucracy – office work. Teachers C & D have also named the same category (meetings) though again different types of work is being undertaken – teacher C is engaged in conflict and negotiation, while D's role is more like a student than a teacher.
To tackle this problem, and figure out what your job and career actually consist of, you will need to do a bit of thinking. What you want to do is to slot the whole of your working life into not-more-than-six categories. Teachers' roles differ, so your six categories may well differ from those of your colleagues. Obviously, this isn't easy if you're new to the job, so I've included example-categories below - but you can and should modify these if they don't reflect the different types of work you actually do.
Example Work Categories
Category 1: real teaching (ie classroom contact with students);
Category 2: administration (ie routine clerical and manual work like reading e-mails and filing papers, but including basic lesson preparation and tick-and-flick marking);
Category 3: creativity (ie any work which requires new ideas, out-of-the-box thinking and inspiration);
Category 4: social contact (ie mutually supportive interaction with other adults)
Category 5: me-time (ie peaceful isolation from other adults, for contemplation, personal decisions etc)
Category 6: competition and decision-making ('competition' includes not only situations – for example sport - which require actual competition, but also pseudo-competition involving confrontation with other adults – for example, difficult meetings, policy arguments with peers; 'decision-making' means what it says: any decisions which are significant to your life and career.
You probably notice a couple of odd things about the example categories. Firstly, there's heresy here. 'Real teaching' tasks are bundled up with non-teaching work. This is because the tasks involve require the same energy, attitude and mindset: if the work doesn't need any great intellectual flair, but it must be done rigorously and on-time, it is the same category of work.
Secondly, this categorisation just doesn't fit with our everyday teacherly way of looking at our job. Some tasks - for example lesson planning - clearly require a combination of categories: a bit of creativity, a fair bit of administration, maybe a bit of social contact... and that is the key point here. To use time efficiently, we may need to slice our cakes differently. We may need to break up our lesson planning so the creative bit comes in the evening, the admin bit in the afternoon and the social bit in the morning. Why? Well... most of us have times in our day - or in our week - when we are at our most creative; so logically, that is when we want to do our creative work. If we want to ask a colleague for help, then there are good times to ask and less good times. When we have time to do admin, we don't always have the energy to do anything creative, and so on. The trick here is to seek consistently to do the right things at the right time... and this means that we need to plan when we do them.
The final odd thing is that you cannot always categorise actual tasks too far in advance. That monthly team meeting may have been administration last time, but this time it may require creativity and next time it may involve competition and important decisions. Be prepared to categorise as you go.